Craven Museum: Nearly a Century of Yorkshire Memory

Step through the doors of Skipton Town Hall on a quiet morning, and you step into something rare — a museum that feels less like a collection and more like a conversation with the land itself. Limestone fossils older than memory. A Celtic sword pulled from the moors. The handwriting of Shakespeare's printers, pressed into pages four centuries ago. Craven Museum holds roughly 60,000 objects, but to count them is to miss the point. What it truly holds is the accumulated curiosity of a community that has never stopped asking: what was here before us?

A Museum Born from Borrowed Rooms and Borrowed Time

The story begins in 1927, when the Craven Naturalists and Scientific Association appointed a small committee with a large ambition: to give the district a proper museum. The driving forces were Arthur Raistrick — the geologist and archaeologist who would become one of the Dales' most celebrated scholars — alongside Francis Dufty, a teacher at Ermysted's Grammar School, and John Fielden, a Skipton gentlemen's outfitter. They had no building, no budget, and no paid staff. What they had were collections that already existed but had no home: the Elbolton Cave finds from Reverend E. Jones' excavations, Roman artefacts unearthed at the nearby fort of Elslack, a fossil collection, the Craven Herbarium, and Richard Tiddeman's reef knoll specimens.

On 7 July 1928, they opened the doors of a single room above Skipton Library. Visiting hours were Saturday afternoons, two until four, staffed entirely by volunteers. The formal inauguration came on 6 October 1928, when Sir Henry Alexander Miers, president of the Museums Association, gave the ceremony its official weight. A museum had been willed into existence by sheer civic determination.

From Survival to Reinvention

For its first six years, the museum survived on goodwill alone. By 1934, the committee recognised that voluntary effort could not sustain what was growing into a serious institution, and Skipton Urban District Council agreed to take over management. David Etty became the museum's first curator. Through the mid-twentieth century, the collection expanded steadily — spilling into a second basement room in the 1960s — but the library premises were never ideal. The turning point came on 11 December 1973, when the museum moved across the road into Skipton Town Hall, a far grander civic building that gave it room to breathe and the gravitas it deserved.

The most dramatic chapter, however, is the most recent. In September 2018, the museum closed for a complete reinvention. Funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and titled Stories and Treasures of Street and Dale, the £2.1 million project didn't simply refresh the displays — it relocated the entire museum from an upper floor, accessible only by a steep staircase, down to the ground floor. Accessibility was at the heart of it: a museum that everyone in the community could physically reach. On 21 June 2021, the new Craven Museum opened its doors, and the response was immediate. Within two years it had won the Kids in Museums Family Friendly Museum Award and Best Accessible Museum, and in 2024 it was shortlisted for Art Fund Museum of the Year — a remarkable recognition for a small regional institution.

What the Walls Hold

The collections span millions of years. Geologically, there are Welbury Wilkinson Holgate's mineral specimens and Arthur Raistrick's own geological fieldwork — ammonites, corals, bivalves, Ichthyosaurus vertebrae — a cross-section of deep time pulled from the Dales limestone. Archaeologically, the range runs from Palaeolithic tools to post-medieval finds: Elbolton and Victoria Cave artefacts, objects from the Roman settlement at Kirk Sink Villa, and an Elizabethan coin hoard.

Then there are the singular treasures. The Flasby Sword — an Iron Age Celtic weapon found on Flasby Moor, its copper scabbard lined with wood and incised with Celtic ornament, preserved so well that archaeologists believe it was deliberately placed in a ritual pit. A Merovingian Frankish Gold Tremissis, a tiny gold coin from around 580–630 AD, discovered during building work at Holy Trinity Church, with a small hole drilled in its edge suggesting someone once wore it as a pendant. The Amethyst Intaglio, a Roman carved gemstone found in Hellifield, depicting a man — possibly Odysseus — offering wine to the cyclops Polyphemus. And presiding over everything, an incomplete but genuine Shakespeare First Folio, printed in 1623, donated by the daughter of a local businessman in the 1930s and misidentified as a Second Folio until scholar Anthony James West corrected the record in 2003. It is one of only a handful on permanent public display anywhere in the world.

The human scale is here too. Colonel Tottie's Victorian bird egg collection. Seventy oral history tapes preserving memories of the World Wars, work on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, and farming in the Dales. Costumes from the eighteenth century through the 1940s. Seventeen carved oak pieces by Robert "Mouseman" Thompson. Oil paintings of Lady Anne Clifford of Skipton Castle. Social history objects connecting the area to Thomas Spencer, co-founder of Marks & Spencer, who was born in Skipton.

Why It Matters

Craven Museum is proof of what happens when a community refuses to let its own story be forgotten. It was built not by wealthy benefactors or government decree, but by naturalists, teachers, and shopkeepers who understood that the objects accumulating in their basements and study drawers were pieces of something larger. Nearly a century later, it continues to do what those founders intended: make the deep history of the Craven Dales visible, tangible, and free to anyone who walks through the door.

Visiting Craven Museum

Craven Museum is located within Skipton Town Hall on High Street, Skipton, North Yorkshire, BD23 1AH. Admission is free. The Town Hall sits in the heart of Skipton's market town centre, approximately five minutes' walk from the bus station and twenty minutes from the railway station. Store tours and research visits to the collections are available by appointment.

This article was partly inspired by old photographs and recordings that came to light when someone brought their personal memories to be digitised. It made us wonder what else is out there — in attics, shoeboxes, old cupboards — connected to Craven Museum. If anyone holds old media connected to this organisation, services like EachMoment can help preserve them for future generations.